The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the Erasmus+ scheme – a reciprocal exchange process that let UK students study at European universities, and European students come to the UK – is again under the spotlight.
Campaigns for the UK’s re-entry to the scheme are ongoing. But diplomat Nick Leake told a committee meeting in Brussels that the terms for the UK to remain part of Erasmus+ were too expensive, and that Brits’ poor language skills caused an imbalance between the numbers of UK students travelling abroad and EU students coming to the UK.
My research focuses on language and intercultural education. The British are not inherently bad at learning languages, but there has been a decline in international language learning among young people. However, this should not be a pretext to justify the withdrawal from the Erasmus+ programme.
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